Celestia Forums

Hey all, have been working on a side project for a day or so and have some preliminary pics to show. The glow on the right side of Io is from the Prometheus volcano on Io. It is considered to be the "old faithful" on Io. The plume is optical as opposed to others on Io. It is approximately 60 km in height. I modeled ejecta and it seems to come from the surface pretty nicely. I also modeled the "glow" seen by Voyager, Galileo and Hubble... However, this glow is an atmosphere on a subterranean sphere and it has all of the clipping/depth sorting issues (3rd pic) we have seen before. I still wish (hi Chris) we had the ability to just include spheres of diffuse glow...

Anyway...

Very interesting and much better than the old solution:putting a comet tail near the volcano...

buggs_moran wrote:Hey all, have been working on a side project for a day or so and have some preliminary pics to show. The glow on the right side of Io is from the Prometheus volcano on Io. It is considered to be the "old faithful" on Io. The plume is optical as opposed to others on Io. It is approximately 60 km in height. I modeled ejecta and it seems to come from the surface pretty nicely. I also modeled the "glow" seen by Voyager, Galileo and Hubble... However, this glow is an atmosphere on a subterranean sphere and it has all of the clipping/depth sorting issues (3rd pic) we have seen before. I still wish (hi Chris) we had the ability to just include spheres of diffuse glow...

Very nice!

How did you model the ejecta?
Any ETA for download?

Oh, and if this is a side project, I'm very interested to know what's the main project.

I modeled the ejecta with a stationary invisible object locked at the right long/lat at the surface. Then I created 16 stationary invisible objects (I called them ordinates) in a circular pattern around the central one. Finally I created a torus mesh that orbited the 16 ordinates with variable speed, and slight distance variations. The culmination is the illusion of ejecta from the volcano...

My major project is here...

http://www.celestiaproject.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=9342

and just so people know, I know I've promised a release of the CV's over and over. I am too picky about my work. I am working on putting beta versions up since gamma versions seem so far off in the future...

The ejecta can also be modeled as a pure CMOD object, using partial "field lines". Later this week, I may try to do a model of ejection.

Yeah, I thought of trying to contact you regarding that possibility. One thing I didn't like about mine was the sheet effect that one sees at the "caldera". It doesn't look natural... I will post or send you the addon if you want the placement data for lat/long. I used the new frames of reference callouts in my ssc...

Before doing a volcano model, I'll have to think a bit about the rendering style :

1- "frosted" parabolic curves, like a "snapshot" of an ejection.

or :

2- small parts of circles (with some transparency effects at the extremities) moving on a circular path, to simulate the live dejections.

I just did the frosted type... It looks nice enough. Couldn't decide on coloring. I found one picture online of Prometheus and it showed some pretty dark streaks, but it's hard to make out any real detail.